


sons and daughters

by inheritor



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Child Death
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-06-09
Updated: 2012-06-09
Packaged: 2017-11-07 09:21:14
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 4
Words: 4,411
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/429407
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/inheritor/pseuds/inheritor
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sburb is not a game. It's a coping mechanism because children are young and their deaths are tragic.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. John: Rise Up

**1\. John: Rise Up**

On the first week, he baked. 

Pipe jaunty in his mouth, he smashed the eggs into jagged hard shells and goopy insides, beat the mix until the bowls cracked under dough and reality, watched the dough burn and crack in the sickly red oven. When he removed the cake from the dark jail, he threw the freshly baked pastry into the trash. He baked from the morning dusk into the struggling dusk because if he did not bake, there would be the silence. 

It was always quiet now. 

In the silence, half-asleep and hands idle, he remembered short fragments of the decrepit movie with a horrified audience. The film reel rewinds, plays forward, and it is April 13th again and again, his son’s thirteenth birthday. The camera pans away. The car pulls up to the driveway of their suburban house, toys littered in the front yard. He could see himself entering his house in still frames. He throws off his jacket, calls his son’s name, and finally climbs the winding stairs. Zoom in on the faint smile on his face, so expectant to see his son with knobby knees drawn up in front of the computer. In slow motion, he opens the door, though the audience screams for him to leave the door shut, just leave it shut. 

Their cries are unheard. The man opens the door. 

His son lies dead on the carpet, band-aided knees and awkward elbows splayed out against the carpet. Blood is everywhere—seeping out the grotesque grin of the creature of his shirt, splattered on charming movie actor’s winning smiles, dripping down his partially open chest, magic and not. His son’s features are still childish and young beneath the blood, even stabbed through the heart and lying in a pool of his own sickly blood. Round cheeks, thick glasses, a faint sliver of buckteeth that he should have outgrown in his ascending adulthood. 

That was his son.

That was his son, dead on the floor, and the camera goes shaky and drops to the floor, tumbling to the side in the haziness of memories and the man yells and rushes forward and drops down to his knees and tries to hold the small boy in his arms but the blood smears on his shirt and his fingers come up sticky and then crusted as he tries to pin his phone to his ear and demand from the operator hope that the broken heart inside his son’s rib cage can be pieced back together. Spoilers to the awaiting audience: his son's heart cannot be stitched together again.

They took away the body and returned a casket. 

He had raised his son with love and care. He knew his son was growing up, soon to be thirteen. His son had the biggest grin in the world and the world’s cleverest prankster’s gambit. He kicked out his feet at the breakfast table, and he laughed with a slight snort in every giggle. He played the piano—he created computer programs—he watched movies with loud cries at every expected plot twist. He was a good boy. He was such a good boy. 

Sometimes, he had been afraid he was losing his son to another world, the pains of growing up. An obsession with harlequins and a self-defeating mantra scrawled in bright colors on his wall, a constant reminder of his own defeat. Perhaps, if he had been a better father, he could have helped his son. He had tried, oh, he had tried to fill the house with harlequins to comfort his son, but his son reacted violently against them. But far more worrisome were the words inscribed in permanent neon green across the posters, a loud rebuke from his son to himself about his own worthlessness. He had tried to show his pride. He tried to put into the words his bursting feeling of happiness and pride in his little boy, the indescribable fact that his son was more brilliant than he could have believed. It had been a blessing, a joyous moment, when he scooped up the small baby into his arms, the tiny features, the small fingers and curled toes. 

He had been frightened, at first, to raise a child on his own. A baby was small and fragile, a mysterious being who stared up at him with bright eyes and small gurgles. But his son had always been special. His son was always going to be the best thing in his life. 

But the strangest things disgusted him now, because he was a broken man. The toys in his front yard disgusted him because they carried heavy memories, chipper laughter turned to wailing tears over scraped knees and bruised fingers. The harlequins in his house disgusted him because they were a lost cause, to reach out to a boy who would never care about them again. The note underneath the safe was burned, because his boy never knew how much he meant to him. 

Sometimes, sensations disgusted him. He woke up in cold sweat in the middle of the night, hat sliding off his head, because there was a certain way his son’s arms fell to his side when he tried to hold the still-warm body. The way the lifeless skeletal frame pressed against his hands, the way his son felt so light when he picked him up, the stillness of his chest. 

It should have been him in the house. It should have been him to be stabbed through the heart, not his son with the cheerful grin and happy face. They never found the murderer, a speculated burglar who had picked the wrong time and the wrong window of the wrong house of the wrong street in the wrong city. 

His son should have grown up to be an admirable man, a happy grandfather. His son died before he could grow. His son died with the self-loathing scrawl on the walls, such hatred inside him, a tormented feeling of failure pressed against his nightmares that made him curl up in his childish blankets for protection against himself. 

He failed as a father. 

He hadn’t kept his son safe.

There were no more holidays. No Christmas, because he had no gifts to wrap for his son. No helping his son make Valentine’s Day cards, no Easter to hide the eggs. He lived for one day out of the year, where he visited the cemetery that should have housed him instead, and his human son was a cold tombstone. 

He always took a cake and emptily arranged the surrounding flowers. The cemetery always laid cold before him, rows of tombstones peering up like teeth through the stifling dirt. Statues watched him with quiet eyes, judging him for his failures. He stood, never able to breathe or wish his son a happy birthday in the still air.


	2. Dave: Throw Yourself Out the Window

**2\. Dave: Throw Yourself Out the Window**

It was such bullshit. 

They told him different stories, because nobody bothers to get their story right for just one more statistics in the city. They gave him options, like this was a shitty choose your own adventure book. His little bro either got his throat slit, or maybe if that wasn’t enough, a side order option of shot in the back, or like a goddamn Happy Meal, could have died in a huge explosion. A sword through the gut, sure, but maybe he was still alive for a while after the stab, knowing he was doomed to die with all that blood seeping from his soft gushy intestines, and unable to do anything about it. But it wasn’t even a choice. No pick and choose, not a puzzle. They ended up with his little brother was dead.

First, he got angry. Real angry. He never stopped being angry, because his little brother was thirteen and now his blood splashed on his chin and dripped down his shirt. He didn’t like thinking about it, never talked about it, just swung around his katana and smashed every damn body who got in his way. He got angry, he got mad, but even after he hunted down every possible suspect who had killed his little brother in any possible way, he was just empty and angry at an uncaring world.

He got into fights, punches to his face breaking his shades and bruising his jaws, broken arms and twisted ankles, irreversible damage to his body the nurses would say and he would just get up and walk the shit out of that hospital to get into another bar fight. He picked the stupidest fights, the ones with no chance of winning, the ones with a certainty of winning. Every second spent getting his brain turned into a sloppy shaken mush was another second not thinking about the fact that his little brother was killed and he wasn’t there to stop it. 

Should have been there. Shoulda woulda coulda, but of course he wasn’t there. Didn’t even know what he was thinking sometimes, all the guilt weighing anxiously on his heart, but it wasn’t like he could have just swooped in and saved the day, except he should have. Didn’t matter where or when or how, should have gotten on a shitty skateboard and land on the ground with his katana swinging. 

His little brother had been too young. It was probably the shitty neighborhood, that was the cause, it was probably the way he raised him, that was the cause. Should have trained him harder, not just dicked around with him. But he’d just been too young for this bullshit the world had thrown at them. The both of them. He had trained his little brother from the get-go to fight, but his worst nightmare came true and he lived it, every single day of his life, failures pressing on his head. 

It was the alone part that ate away at him. He sat alone in his room, and everything felt unsatisfactory. He used to be able to entertain himself with Lil Cal and smuppets, letting their loose limbs dance around. They were good friends, but now they laid there with their eyes wide open and they weren’t like his little brother, his asshole prick of a little brother, his little brother. 

They didn’t tell each other things like I love you, this wasn’t no Valentine’s Day card and he wasn’t giving out chocolates for shit. There were fights, and there were weapons in the refrigerator and there were smuppets stuffed in the ceiling and that was all. That was the way he lived his life, no regrets. 

But he regretted.

He regretted the seconds he left early, skipping out on their rapping sessions. Regretted the moments shaved away on his life because he was filming some snuff film, and his little brother sat alone in their apartment. Useless regrets ate away at him, just leaving frayed pieces of his liver and kidneys behind, and he picked another fight because he hadn’t been there to save his little brother.

One time, there’d been a kid walking down the street. Normal kid, looked nothing like Dave, because no kid looked like Dave except Dave. But the kid looked fourteen, and he was standing on the roofs and he suddenly felt sick because Dave would have been fourteen if he had lived through his larynx being sawed away in half. That kid could have been him, and maybe he’d grown up, make shitty movies for a living. 

Instead, the kid laid six feet under, and he stood on top the roof and watched the kid walk by without a care in the world. 

He disgusted himself, sometimes. He’d go into a bar, and start talking about his bro. He’d go into the gory details of his death, recounting each possibility with gruesome details. Yeah, he would say, even as he watched as the other person shrink in horror, yeah, my little brother, maybe he was just sitting around on his computer, maybe he was up and walking, some guy came up behind him, and he was thirteen, get this, thirteen, voice just starting to crack and then it stopped forever, because he just cut, and you could see his bone through the meaty flaps of flesh, maybe he lived for a second, couldn’t talk and couldn’t scream for his older brother, not that it mattered, his shitty older brother wouldn’t have gotten there in time anyway he’s that shitty, that’s the good story, get this, get this, could have had a sword stab through his gut, died in excruciating pain, not like that slit to the throat no sir just a messy stab and maybe he bled out until his organs couldn’t function and he could feel the pain, searing hot in his mind, hurt to even move, laid there and must have been goddamn horrific, knowing something was going through his body and he couldn’t take it out because he was goddamn thirteen and he just liked dead things in amber and making horrible webcomics and instead he was lying out and waiting for someone to come save him but guess what, guess, he only had a shithole of a brother, a dickwad for family, isn’t that a shame, it’s a shame. 

The beats blared when he entered into his apartment. Neighbors used to complain, but he fought them, fought them all, fought those who hadn’t even complained at all, because the silence got to him more than sounds, more than the death crows that cawed in loneliness against the blood red sky, and he only had his puppets to keep him company but he had made a silent promise that one boy would never be alone. But now he was frozen in time because he would live every single day as the day when the police knocked on his door, and he left his little brother alone and dead.


	3. Seer: Descend

**3\. Seer: Descend**

Black out. Fade in. Wake up at three in the afternoon with her drink half-empty, mouth dry, head throbbing, and footsteps on the first floor. The familiar steps from her room, the thunk of a book, the soft chanting above, and then rapid typing. Being haunted by a ghost would have meant she had something of her daughter left, but she had nothing. Her mouth drew into a sharp line, and she kept her eyes steady on the ceiling until the footsteps faded, embarrassed to have encountered her while she was still drunk. 

She was always drunk, nowadays. 

There had been a difference. A line, more or less, between recreational drink and a necessity drink. Now she lived everyday from bar to bar, her scarf draped over her shoulders as she chugged down the drinks. Some were fruity, light and sweet, and others were dark, heavy and ancient as they slid down her throat. Her favorites were the ones with the slight tingle, or the decorative umbrellas, because there wasn’t a good reason drinks couldn’t be fun. She knew the faces of all the barkeepers in town and the faces of all the shadiest stores in town, because she came home with bottles clinking, and she sat and drank herself away.

She crawled away from the recreational drink to stoop in the misery and hellhole, losing days at a time. She woke up in different places, sometimes jail, and strangest, home. Her house was so empty, and all the bottles were emptier. She was a waster, a filthy indulgent waster who left a film of alcohol at the bottom of her glass because if she looked too closely at the bottom, she would see the haggard reflection of herself. 

Black out, fade in. 

The funeral was elaborate. It was the perfect party, the largest event for miles. The mausoleum to house her daughter’s body was larger than her own house. The flowers were always fresh and carefully tended. She read out loud from the most pretentious books and then elected to read out loud from her daughter’s selection. Perfectly poised, she broke the bottle of champagne on the stone doors. All the engravings were done by hand, and the casket was carved from the most marvelous wood. Had her daughter been alive, she never would have been able to defeat that. 

Her daughter had been a genius. She enjoyed having her daughter in the house. It was a strange phrase, but there was something pleasant in playing with the vacuum cleaner and hanging elaborate frames on the refrigerator. Her house was mostly vacant, now, by necessity to have Rose’s things in Rose’s mausoleum, and by necessity to stop the feelings rising like bile to her throat. 

They tried to persuade her that she drank too much, but they didn’t understand. They couldn’t see the visions flashing in the darkness of her eyelids, the images of her lovely genius daughter who never had the chance to grow. She could have grown, oh yes, into a magnificent young woman, because she was a genius despite the way she was raised. Perhaps she would have been an author. She always had the talent. 

If Rose had still been alive, perhaps she would have pointed out, with her writer’s gift, the past tense of the whole thing. A speculative nature at best at a lost future designed to milk the grievance. 

Perhaps she should see a therapist. 

But she was a walking disaster. She shouted and screamed and threw the bottles at the walls, leaving shards scattered everywhere and the amber liquid pooling at her feet, even as she stood with drunken rigidity. In the classiest upscale restaurant in fifty miles, she drank an entire bottle of wine before smashing the flowers and then the food and then the table, screaming to the world about her daughter. 

She was a walking disaster. She made bad decisions with her head as a mess, but at least she was separated from the grotesque memories, for even a second. They were scared of her because she would suddenly scream, angrily, when somebody mentioned her daughter. They were terrified of her because she would scream, angrily, when nobody mentioned her, because Rose deserved to be remembered. But she couldn’t stop her downward spiral, waking up in the murky darkness in the hallway of her own house, lips dry and hair messy, peeling the fur of the carpet from the front of her jacket and trying to stumble around in the darkness to escape the memories. 

She must have been a bad mother. She hadn’t thought of it, quite that way, but she knew it in her mind in the brief moments when she hadn’t drank enough but wasn’t sober enough to pursue the thought. In the middling stage, she couldn’t sit for a second, and she needed to stand up. She needed to move. 

There were three types of endings to her drunken binges. First type, hallucination. Second type, memory. Third type, Rose. 

Black out, fade in.

The third was that moment, just a feeling, when she remembered the blood on her daughter’s black clothes, seeping into the pinkness of her sash, her head lying sideways and her young face still untouched. That feeling when the glass dropped out of her hands, that moment when she touched her side of her daughter’s neck and felt the chill. 

If she had seen a therapist, perhaps they would have told her what she didn’t want to hear. She drank to escape the memories, but she hated waking up on her couch in the solid cool darkness, waiting for the light to never seep through her curtains again.


	4. Descend

**4\. Descend**

He had a young granddaughter. She had thick black hair, and slightly protruding teeth. They didn’t come more perfect than her, and he knew it. He was an adventurer by heart, and she was the best adventure he ever had. Battling diapers, journeying into the unknown of feeding children, exploring the darkness of scolding, this was all far more exciting than any wild jungle. 

In his youth, he had thirsted for exploration. It was in his blood. He swung from trees and he fought off enemies, all while saving the artifacts and harboring a secret hankering towards noble blue ladies. He traveled through rain forests and sat on a raft across oceans. He lived off the land, and he cracked secrets thousands of years hidden underneath the earth. He was a sure-shooting sort of fellow, who didn’t accept any willy-nilly jabbering about staying in one place for too long. He spun two pistols in each hand, and winked at the world. 

His attitude didn’t change when he grew older, but she changed everything. His precious granddaughter, his lovely girl. There was no treasure chest filled with enough gold to persuade him to leave her, and he had seen quite his fill of treasure chests. But a gold doubloon had nothing on watching his granddaughter take her first steps, wobbly and unsure, in the room filled with artifacts from his journey. Mummies had no weight to see her giggle for the first time. It was a pathetic comparison for the fanciest guns to try and compete against her insistence on nap time. 

He was too old to watch his granddaughter die. 

She died in the way he raised her, saving another’s life at the expense of her own in an instinctual moment, and he was proud. He was proud her life had been happy, as she planted her seeds and slept on her bed. She was resourceful and an adventurer, and she had been ready for her next big journey, death.

But she left behind a grandfather too old to have an adventure after hers. 

His spirit weighed heavy as he carefully stitched her together, and placed her in the attic. It was a family tradition, honored, but it would be the last tradition honored. His own body wouldn’t receive the same treatment, which was a blasted shame, but he had expected Jade to outlive him by far. He knew the day of his own final adventure had been approaching, but hers had run so quickly, flying into time. There had been no hurry. 

He lived alone on a large island, in a house built from empty space. His own health waned in want of hers, but he only felt the empty presence press painfully against his heart every morning when he opened his eyes. Though he was a logical man, he always expected to see her burst in through her door. He was growing old, and pathetic, for once he turned with high excitement at the thought of seeing her, but it was only her cold metallic dreambot standing in the corner. 

The pain had only grown worse. His house was too big, far too big, for such an old man. He hiked up and down the stairs, listening to his own footsteps bounce off the walls. From the corner of his eyes, he could see his collected figures lying around dusty rooms. His own house was magical, he would swear by it, because no matter he was certain that dusting one room would only lead to another room slowly becoming dusty.

Even in her death, he had a good relationship with her. When he climbed to visit her, she always knew she would be rambunctious and wish to go out, even though he warned her against it. Sometimes, she would even need a loud scolding to drive the point through. He enjoyed visiting her body, to watch the thunderstorm light her wild grin and hear her whisper old jokes to him. Certainly, they butted heads once in a while, but they were family and family stuck together.

But the good relationship with his deceased daughter didn’t always quite help. Sometimes, he would sit alone with her, and not say a single word. They gazed together into the night sky, where the stars glittered above, and the world held all the mysteries he could possibly unlock. But he no longer had the drive to leave his granddaughter, who had been his companion in times of need, a support in times of want, a strength in times of weakness. 

He gave her gifts during the holidays. Her hands were posed as if always about to drop down and clap together in delight, so he suspected that she enjoyed her distant gifts from lands she had only heard from fictional books. He always chose the best gifts, the ones that, when he discovered them, he thought he would only want to part with them for a very good friend. Of course, he only had very good friends, but she was still the most precious to him. 

But she was still dead, and he was still old. 

In another world, perhaps, none of this might have happened. He was a wise old man, and he lived through his times. He referred to himself as old without the sense of struggle, but in gratefulness for the world’s gifts to him. In his life, he had seen more people in a month than most saw in their lives. He traveled far and wide, and he learned more information than libraries could hold. But these, he did not consider especially important. His daughter had lived an equally full life, if not better. 

But in his due wisdom, he thought another world could have held the answers. A world where children lived, where they fought with their optimism and their essence of childhood defended them. In this world, Jade would still be alive. Perhaps more children would still be alive. Sometimes, in his infinite wisdom of sitting between posters of blue-skinned females, he thought he could glimpse into the world. 

His eyesight was failing, but he thought he could hear the soft rings of children laughing together, four colors flashing briefly in the brief gaps of space, where if he turned his head specifically one way at a certain time in a certain day, when the wind blew against his windows and the light hit just right, he could see into the world.

But mostly, he mourned the death of his granddaughter. She had been his everything, his final adventure, his girl. Thinking about her always surged different feelings into his head, an infinite joy of her life and deep sorrow for her death. But always, always, in the end, he lived alone in a house with far too much space for one person to live.


End file.
